Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

12.3. The Developer's Guide

The Developer's Guide is used both by the core development team and the application maintenance team. Figure 12-1 shows the high-level table of contents for a typical Developer's Guide.

Figure 12.1. Figure 12-1

Although I've discussed the majority of these subjects earlier in this book, the following provides a quick overview of the sections that would be included in the Developer's Guide:

• Solution Overview — The Solution Overview is the outline of the code solution as well as the tools and technologies involved. It also includes overviews of hardware architecture and components, such as the individual servers, load balancers, and networking components, as well as software components such as batch job overviews, report overviews, and component overviews, including information on how they will be implemented — for example, adding new batch jobs or adding new reports, and so on. The Solution Overview documents the configuration of the development environment as a starting point for further enhancement. The Solution Overview also covers areas such as development environment tools and their installation and set-up.

• Standards and Guidelines — The Standards and Guidelines section collates and documents all the various standards and practices that should be incorporated in the solution, including coding standards, commenting standards, logging and events, ...